Film Update

The overall reaction to No Bigger Than a Minute has been positive. Some comments that have been made after preview screenings include:

A writer friend of mine said: “You completely put your neck on the line, and you made a piece of art out of it. Bravo.” But I was especially glad that many others — people I had not met before — came over throughout the week to offer adjectives I wouldn’t hesitate to quote on the movie poster.

From a film distributor: “I found it compelling, rich, extremely diverse; I think the ultimate film on the issue. Anyone who would do a film after this one is wasting his or her time.”

From a film festival audience member: “As a little person myself, I thought you’ve got a wonderful film that portrayed us very accurately and very honestly. And I thank you and I hope it goes really far. It’ll make my life much easier, too.”

The inevitable question at screenings appears to be, “Was it difficult to reveal so much of your personal journey of making the film in the film?” The answer is “yes” to the extent that No Bigger Than a Minute has evolved considerably from the film I began making. At the outset I believed I was making a social commentary type of film. I believed it was enough to present the unusual, odd, weird, limiting representations of dwarfs — mostly in the arts and modern media — and comment on them in voiceover narration and meaningful editing juxtapositions.

Along the way it became clear that as I was learning what was out there, I was also learning how little I really knew about myself as a dwarf person. I knew no more than the average person out there and most of that was determined by images of dwarfs — that’s just about all that most people “know” because so few of us ever get to meet and speak with a dwarf face to face. It’s that way necessarily because there are so few dwarf persons in anyone’s life.

When I realized I had been pretending for most of my life that those images of dwarfs reflected nothing of my own life as a dwarf person, I had to stop pretending. I had to realize that, whether I liked it or not, my own visual difference had determined a lot of my choices and behaviors and I might as well acknowledge that. The film depicts me trying new ideas about who and what I am on for size.